Dissertation

My dissertation focused on a new way to estimate adult mortality rates in poor
countries where there are currently no reliable data on deaths. This problem is
important because, as long as we can’t figure out how to measure adult
mortality in the world’s poorest countries, we can’t measure life expectancy,
understand the full impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, or investigate
socioeconomic differences in health. In my dissertation, I develop a new method
for estimating adult death rates from a household survey. The new strategy –
which builds on existing techniques from demography, sociology, and
anthropology – is based on the idea that we can ask survey respondents to tell
us about deaths in their personal networks to learn about deaths in the general
population. I apply the new method in a large household survey conducted in 27
Brazilian cities (see below). I also apply the method in a
nationally-representative household survey from Rwanda, which is a
country where adult death rates aren’t known, and new techniques are needed
to estimate them (see below). Although my dissertation focuses on adult mortality, the new
technique could be applied to estimate many other quantities that are currently
hard to measure.

Data collection

Brazil

My collaborators and I designed and implemented the largest network scale-up
survey ever conducted, with n=25,000 respondents in 27 Brazilian cities. The
survey allows me to apply the new method I develop in my dissertation to
estimate adult death rates and out-migration rates in each city.
For deaths and out-migration, there are gold-standard rates we can validate the
new method against, meaning that we will have 27 different tests of the new
method's accuracy for two different quantities.

Rwanda

My collaborators and I designed and implementated a large,
nationally-representative household survey from Rwanda (n=5,000). We collected
the data needed to produce adult death rate estimates using the new method.
(Adult death rates aren't known in Rwanda, and new techniques like the one my
dissertation is based on are needed to estimate them.) We also conducted a
survey experiment that showed that there may be a trade-off between the
quantity and quality of information collected in a scale-up study. Our
experimental design can serve as a template for future scale-up studies that
seek to produce substantive estimates while simultaneously using an experiment
to learn more about the methodology used to produce scale-up estimates.